Makeover Monday 2019

2018 is not quite finished and the real ‘end point’ to the year will come in this week’s recap. It is, however, time to announce where Makeover Monday is heading in 2019, what’s changing, what’s new and what you can expect from us and the project.

Why are we changing things?

As Makeover Monday continues to grow in size and global reach, we always look for ways to optimize our processes, reduce complexity and to use the right tools that help us do more. Our mission is to help improve the way we visualize and analyze data – one chart at a time. To achieve this we want to focus on coaching, feedback and support and in turn reduce the administrative effort required to run the project.

At the beginning of 2018 we introduced a number of changes and over the course of the year realized that not all of them worked out the way we intended. So we’re looking to tweak things a little bit more.

What we want to ensure is that every change we make makes us better able to coach and guide the community. The focus for us in 2019 will be to:

Continue providing feedback as much as possible;

Create content to teach key concepts and best practices;

Open our platform to #dataviz experts and outstanding community members to share their knowledge and skills with our global community;

Help to connect participants through our online channels as well as Live events where possible, and

To bring Makeover Monday to the Enterprise through our workshop offering.

The next few paragraphs will give you some details on what we’re changing to make #MakeoverMonday an even better project so you can get more content, more lessons, more connections, more practice and more fun out of it.

DATA.WORLD

In January 2018 we introduced data.world as our platform for hosting data and for collecting submissions. We ran our Viz Review webinars through dedicated threads for each dataset and tried to drive discussions on data.world.

Over the course of the year we went from 1 to 5,091 subscribers on data.world. 5,091 data people who contributed at some point, who got involved and many of whom became regular participants and part of our ever-growing community.

We will continue to host datasets on data.world in the familiar way.

What will change:

Viz Review will return to Twitter. If you want feedback on your viz in the webinar, then add the hashtag #MMVizReview when you first post your viz for review. Please note that the hashtag shouldn’t be used for general feedback requests but be dedicated for those people who are using the webinar to get our feedback.

Discussions are already largely happening on Twitter, because data.world features simply don’t allow for threaded conversations. Twitter also gives people a chance to have their work seen in the wider community. We will stop the discussions on data.world (you can still post if you like but we won’t monitor them) and simply use data.world as a data repository for hosting our datasets.

WEEKLY RECAP

The weekly recaps have been a pillar of our project in the last two years and an opportunity for us to review each weekly challenge, look at the difficult aspects some people struggled with, provide our general feedback and share some lessons learned and of course to finish the week on a high with the featuring of our favorites.

These blog posts are very time consuming to write, taking 2-3 hours each week by the time the challenges are identified, lessons are written, examples are created and favorites are picked.

We also noticed by analyzing our website data that the blog posts get very little traffic and based on the mistakes made immediately in the following week, we have concluded that writing these recaps is not the best use of our time.

What will change:

We will create content related to different technical lessons and have this content available and indexed on our website. This will take some time and will happen in the coming days and weeks.

The weekly blog post will continue to highlight outstanding visualizations and feature these favorites which are also part of our gallery.

We will not write lessons learned anymore. Our book covers most of the best practices and tips and the upcoming online content will give you a summary of best practices relating to many topics, including colors, aggregations, layout, storytelling and others.

COMMUNITY PAGE

On the community page of this website, we feature blogs from our community. A number of new people have now started to write blogs and are not listed on this page, while some others who are listed are no longer active. We don’t want the page to go stale and have decided to change from featuring specific blogs to highlighting our entire community.

What will change:

We will update the community page with a dashboard that shows participation across the project.

We will track participation (see next section).

TRACKING

Many people ask us whether we track participation and what our community statistics are. We have a rough idea, based on subscribers on data.world and BrightTALK. We can see how many access each dataset, but none of this is very accurate.

Our only tracking options have been very manual so far which is simply not a workable and sustainable option for us. So we want to involve every participant in the process of creating data about Makeover Monday.

On the one hand, we’ll ask you to make your submission in a google form which will automatically populate a spreadsheet. On the other hand, we’re removing our 2018 request of having everyone post their vizzes to data.world.

The information you provide will be a massive help for us when it comes to the weekly favorite selection as well, because it will save us A LOT of time researching hyperlinks to people’s Twitter profile, interactive vizzes, etc. Thank you for that :-).

What will change:

When you submit a viz, you will do so via a short google form, asking for a link to your viz, your name and Twitter handle. This data will be used to drive our Makeover Monday dashboard (stay tuned for this – we need your data first 🙂 ).

You do NOT need to post anything on data.world.

You will be able to see your submission and everyone else’s in our dashboard. We’re excited to see the numbers grow every week – and not just the number of vizzes but also the number of authors.

WEBINARS

We created a channel on BrightTALK in July 2018 and it has since grown to over 7,300 current subscribers and a total of over 10,000 individuals who have subscribed and viewed content at some point between now and then.

We both really enjoy running webinars, particularly Viz Review, because it gives us a chance to talk directly to YOU.

We will continue to run our Viz Review webinars every Wednesday at 4pm GMT. To receive feedback during these webinars, include the hashtag #MMVizReview in your original tweet.

For 2019, we are also planning a number of webinars with experts from across the community. Having guest speakers present their own topics will bring further variety, diversity and will just mix things up a little bit.

We started in December with two Fanalytics webinars and the first two parts of our ‘Stats for Dataviz’ series with Anna Foard. We will continue with more statistics in January and have an exciting line up for the first few weeks and months of the new year.

What will change:

2019 will bring further content via webinars, with a focus on shorter and more frequent sessions related to topics around data in general, but also data visualization, data analysis, careers in the industry, events, etc.

We encourage you to always provide feedback on the webinars you watch. Whether it’s as little as a star rating or a short comment, we’d love to hear from you, how you found it and what else you’d fnd useful.